I installed Arduino 011 alpha on a Vista laptop. Everything usually works fine but occasionally while uploading to the Arduino board (Decimila), Windows just locks up & nothing can be done except force a power-off reboot. It only happens about every 20 uploads or so--haven't detected any pattern except it's always during an upload. Has anyone else observed this?

One thing I should mention is that when I plugged the board into the USB for the first time Vista seemed to locate and install the appropriate drivers (two of them) all by itself. The instructions said to download the drivers and point Windows to them, but that didn't appear to be necessary. Maybe that's the issue (wrong drivers)?

Thanks for that info--I suppose this would be hard to debug, because the system completely locks up. Maybe I'll see if there's a work-around (like unplugging/plugging the USB every time or something). I'd hate to mess with the drivers which basically seem to be working.

I had what I think is the same problem. I noticed it because my Vista machine would lock up totally (frozen UI requiring a hard power down to recover, not a blue screen crash) when I started sending lots of serial data back from the Arduino to the PC - it would work for a while but lock up after a couple of tens of kbytes of data had been sent back.

In my case it turned out that my original installation had an old driver for the FT232R serial to USB chip on my Diecimelia, I resolved my issues by upgrading to the V2.04.06 drivers from FTDI (available here: http://www.ftdichip.com/Drivers/VCP.htm)